Dead Heat

Anna thought he was adorable. She wanted to adopt him as a big brother and give him a big hug to calm down his rising anxiety.

“My dad was a cop,” he said.

Leslie nodded. “That was in the report.”

“If he hadn’t been a cop, there wouldn’t have been a report,” Dr. Vaughn said. “He believed me. By the time I was ten, I didn’t know why. Hell, I kinda don’t believe me now. I mean, this thing looked like it was eight feet tall, and it ran away from my dog and a horseshoe I threw at it?”

“That dog impressed whoever wrote the report,” Anna said. There hadn’t been any photos of the dog in it, but she had a pretty good idea that “BFDog” in the report (complete with exclamation point and a penciled-in remark that read “I’d have run from that thing, too”) meant it wasn’t your average run-of-the-mill dog.

“Yeah.” Dr. Vaughn quit pacing and grinned. “My dad brought him home from work one day a few years before the … incident. I don’t remember it, but it’s one of those family stories, you know? My mom was scared of him and wanted Dad to take him back where he found it. Then that big dog walked up to her and put his nose on her foot and sighed. He stared at her until she fed him. She was a goner after that.”

He smiled at the memory, then sobered. “We only had him for another month or so after that. One day, he just wasn’t around. Maybe he was hit by a car or something. I think Dad knew exactly what happened because he never went looking for him. And hit by a car is the kind of thing you might not tell a kid. Hey, I ran across a photo of him the other day.”

He booked out of the kitchen, the speed an indicator of how grateful he was for the distraction, and Anna could hear him in another room opening and shutting drawers.

Leslie started to say something, but Anna shook her head. She could hear people talking just outside. In a moment Darin opened the door and escorted a tiny female version of Dr. Vaughn into the kitchen.

She frowned at Leslie and Anna and sat down opposite them with regal suspicion. “Darin tells me that you are here to ask about the time something came into our yard and tried to take my son away,” she said.

“We think it was a fae,” Leslie said. “It sounds like a fae. It acted like a fae. And a fae took a little girl and left a changeling, a fetch, in her place. We are trying to find that little girl. She is five years old. The attempted abduction of your son is not far from where we think our girl was taken. Thirty-odd years might be a long time for us, but it’s a minute to one of the fae.”

The stiffness left Dr. Vaughn’s mother’s back, and she softened. “Thirty years doesn’t feel that long ago to me, either.” She looked up at her son’s partner and said, “Sit, sit, Darin. I gather that Alex never told you about this.”

“No, ma’am,” he said.

“Well, I think he wanted to believe it didn’t happen.”

“What do you think?” asked Leslie.

“I think my son never exaggerated or lied about a thing in his life, no matter how uncomfortable it made him. He was twelve when he told us he liked boys instead of girls. That was right after some friend of his got kicked out of his home for doing the same. Stupid people tossing away the most precious thing God saw fit to give them, I say.” She looked at Leslie. “So yes, I believe him. I also believe we have not been introduced. I am Mary Lu Vaughn.”

“FBI Special Agent Leslie Fisher,” said Leslie as Dr. Vaughn came into the room and put a photo on the table with an air of quiet triumph.

“Anna Smith,” said Anna, staring at the photo of two small children trying to tug a rope from an enormous black animal, “special consultant. And that is a werewolf.”

Charles sat in the front passenger seat, since Leeds had taken one look at him trying to fit in the back and said, “Hey, man, that is just not going to happen, is it? No worries, I’ll catch the backseat.”

Charles wasn’t thrilled with having a stranger behind him, but even Brother Wolf couldn’t make that man feel like a threat, so he figured it would be okay. He didn’t like Marsden’s driving, either. He drove too fast and he didn’t have a werewolf’s reflexes. But if there was a wreck, Charles figured that he, at least, would walk away, so he kept his comments to himself.

“So we’ve concentrated our efforts in Scottsdale because Leeds thinks that this fae probably doesn’t have a huge hunting ground. The ones that steal children tend to get attached to one place even more than the usual fae.”

He waited, so Charles said, “It sounds like a reasonable way to make an impossibly big search smaller.”

“Okay,” Marsden said. “The first place we’re going is a foster home to visit with a fourteen-year-old girl. The girl’s parents gave her up to the state, said they couldn’t deal with her anymore. Claimed she was possessed, things flying around the room with no one touching them, which is why we are visiting even though she’s older than the girl who was taken. Her parents said she was dangerous, but the counselor who gave us this one said she was uncommunicative but showed no signs of violence. The foster mom says we’re okay to talk to her as long as we do it with the foster mom in the room.”

“Why isn’t she in school?” asked Charles.

“Yeah,” Marsden agreed. “I don’t know. But we’ll ask.”

The house they drove to looked pretty much like all the rest of the houses on the street. This was not an upscale neighborhood, but it wasn’t poor, either.

The woman who met them at the door was a human in her midfifties, if Charles was any judge. She introduced herself as Judy White, examined Marsden’s and Leeds’s badges, and frowned at Charles. She wasn’t unhappy about them, but she was careful.

“Consultant,” said Leeds. “No official ID.”

She looked grim. Grimmer. But just nodded. “Blair’s not going to talk to any of you,” she said. “She came here two weeks ago and she hasn’t spoken a word to anyone. She doesn’t eat much. If I could have a word with her parents…” She sucked in a breath. “Well, don’t stand out here. Come in.”

She led them into a house that smelled of … Charles shut his eyes to get a deep breath. Cookies, recently baked. Fresh homemade bread. A man, a woman, three children, and someone in between; that would be the girl they were looking for. Sorrow. This house had seen a lot of sorrow, but there was a warmth to it, too. Nothing smelled like the fetch, which had carried hints of greenwood, magic, and darkness.

He shut the door behind him and tried not to feel like an invading giant when the woman led them to a room with two couches and a couple of those soft squishy chairs, the kind that could unfold with footrests. Charles would let himself be shot before he sat in one of those. They always felt like they were trying to swallow him, and they were impossible to get out of quickly.

He was still trying to decide where to sit when the woman brought in a tall girl of about fourteen wearing clothes that would fit a woman twice her size. She didn’t look at any of them, just sat on the edge of one of the person-swallowing chairs, a pale-skinned, pale-haired girl who was little more than skin and bones. The word that occurred to him wasn’t “starving” but “fading.” This was why no one sent her to school. Even blind humans must be able to tell that she was mostly gone already.

Judy White introduced Marsden and Leeds but made no mention of Charles—and he was fine with that. He watched as Marsden and Leeds did a fair job of good cop/bad cop, Leeds unexpectedly playing bad cop. The girl saw them all right, but she said not a word and gave no reaction to anything they said.

She is abandoned, something whispered in his left ear. Into his right, something else said, Her true name is sorrow.

He did not always act upon the things the spirits told him. They were interested in this girl. They hovered unseen, even by him, in the air around her.

She could be anger, they told him. She could be vengeance, for she has much to be angry about, much to avenge. Those who should have cared for her acted for themselves when they rightly should have acted for her. She has been much sinned against.